ABSTRACT
The history of books for the young is a fascinating and intricate narrative about the tension between entertainment and didacticism; the need to socialise the young into dominant values; the twentieth-century concern for the inner life of the young child. We still hear arguments about the perceived dichotomy between pleasure and the business of learning in the debate in the 1980s and 1990s in Britain, the USA and Australia as to the most ‘suitable’ books for children learning to read in school classrooms. More than one contemporary commentator has seen similarities between the arguments of those like Mrs Trimmer in the early nineteenth century about the need to protect young children and the debates about the ‘suitable’ content of books for the young in the 1980s. The concerns of the latter-day Janeways and Trimmers have resonated in modern times: books for the young have been the arena for debates about the inculcation of attitudes and stances towards racism, sexism and views about those with disabilities, or those who are, in some way, ‘different’. The contemporary arguments perhaps reached their most dramatic pitch when there were letters to The Times and a parliamentary discussion about the compulsory removal from London schools of a book which featured a little girl growing up (quite happily) with a gay male couple (Bosche 1987). Another puzzling and depressing aspect of that contentious debate was that the term ‘real books’, as opposed to structured schemes specifically designed to teach reading, became a term of abuse (Meek 1992).
